


hands on my hands, stone in my shoe

by cryptidgay



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Past Relationship(s), Post-The Unknowing (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25323175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: It doesn’t matter if Tim never forgives him, so long as he is alive to make that choice.(Jon and Tim, in the aftermath.)
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker
Comments: 25
Kudos: 273





	hands on my hands, stone in my shoe

**Author's Note:**

> **content warnings:** unreality, panic attacks, tim-typical suicidal ideation/suicide attempt.
> 
> title adapted from mabel episode 8.5: letter from juniper. this is somewhat of a follow-up to my pre-unknowing jontim bed and breakfast fic [two slow dancers, last ones out,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23420869) but you don't have to read that to enjoy this one.

In the end, it’s almost anticlimactic.

They’re all a bit worse for wear, but still breathing, as they load back into the van that had brought them to Yarmouth. Jon isn’t sure if he’s imagining that it runs smoother without the explosives ticking down to detonation in the trunk. 

He’s exhausted. 

He cannot close his eyes.

It feels too good to be true, and thus it  _ cannot _ be true — he sits in the backseat, behind Basira’s steady-handed driving (and  _ how _ is she so calm, after all of that — that — that nothing-everything-unreality that he still cannot find the words to describe even in his own mind), and steals glances from the corner of his eye at Tim, beside him. Tim is looking out the window, turned away from Jon, but he can catch a reflection in the dark of the glass and see the grim acceptance on Tim’s face. Something more like mourning than victory.

“We’re stopping for the night,” Basira says up front, Jon’s gaze jolting away from Tim like he has been caught doing something he shouldn’t be. (There is no harm in looking, except for when there is. Except for when his eyes hardly even belong to him at this point, taken-over by the urge to behold, to chronicle, to see and see and see.) “Not driving back to London like this. Bouchard’ll have to deal with us claiming another night’s worth of room expenses.”

Basira’s all point-blank statements. She doesn’t allow any room for questioning; that’s probably for the best because there are  _ endless _ questions running through Jon’s mind, a cacophony that would get tangled on his tongue if he were to try speaking them aloud. 

The vast majority are not meant for Basira, anyway.

It isn’t as if his questions to Tim would be regarded kindly. He isn’t convinced Tim would look up at all, even if Jon asked, even if Jon were dying and pleading with Tim to help. Tim hadn’t even flinched when Basira broke the silence. His head against the window, his eyes on the trees lining the highway. Jon wonders what monsters he sees in their silhouettes.

Jon can’t look away. He isn’t entirely sure he’s even  _ blinking _ , loathe to let himself close his most vital sense off for even a half-second. If he does, this will all be another trick of the Stranger; this will be Nikola finally tapping into something he wants badly enough that he’ll believe it is true; Jon will be back in the Unknowing, or in the aftermath of a successful ritual, and nothing will ever be real again —

He doesn’t know what the Stranger would  _ gain _ from putting him in this melancholy-silent scene, but lack of understanding is half the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that he remembers telling Tim to look at him, to  _ look at him _ , remembers the detonator and remembers dragging Tim by the arm away from the building though he  _ knew _ Tim had never intended to leave that wax museum. It had seemed poetic, martyrdom in the defeat of that same thing that had murdered Tim’s brother, right up until Jon realized it wasn’t  _ necessary _ . “I don’t forgive you for this,” Tim’d said or screamed or whispered over the deafening unmusic of the circus’ dance, but that didn’t  _ matter _ , because Tim would be safe.

It doesn’t matter if Tim never forgives him, so long as he is alive to make that choice.

It has to be real. If this were imagined, wouldn’t Jon have conjured up a world in which everything was as it had been? In their research days, an exhausted Jon could have leaned across the middle seat and rested his head against Tim’s shoulder, fallen asleep feeling Tim’s breathing below him and knowing he was safe. 

That, he thinks, is what he would have imagined if this were a dream or a Stranger-induced nightmare or some in-between unreality.

Which means  _ this _ must be real, he decides or hopes as the van hums to a stop in the dim parking lot of the bed and breakfast. It seems unfathomable that this is the very same place they had started their day. It’s not even midnight; the countless time spent in the swirling effervescence of the ritual had been merely a few hours to the outside world, entirely unaware of what has occurred but for the few scattered firetrucks they had passed rushing, sirens blazing, towards the smoldering ruins of the wax museum.

It seems almost inconceivable that the bed and breakfast’s lobby should look exactly the same as it had this morning. How, with all that has happened, with the world nearly  _ ending _ beneath their noses, could the clerk greet their exhausted group with a chipper  _ back again? _

Basira hands Jon the key, old-fashioned turn-in-the-lock kind rather than most hotels’ keycards, and it is exactly the same tarnished silver as it was the night before. Nobody speaks as they go to their rooms — not side-by-side as they had been last night, with how late they’ve arrived at the bed and breakfast, but across the building. Still in the same pairs.

It isn’t a surprise that Daisy and Basira wouldn’t want to leave each other’s sides after all of that, but Jon finds himself shaken that Tim doesn’t even put up a token fight at rooming with Jon again, just follows him into the room and shuts the door behind them.

In silence, they put down their bags. Take off their shoes. Take off their jackets. Jon drapes his over the desk chair and Tim tosses his onto the floor, haphazard, every movement faux-casual and uncaring and  _ wrong _ . 

It strikes Jon that this is not how things should be. They’ve just  _ saved the world _ . There should be something celebratory in that, but everything is the same as it has been for months. 

The room is heavy with things unsaid, unsayable. Jon opens his mouth to try to lighten it.

The bathroom door clicks behind Tim at the very same moment Jon lodges a single syllable loose, and his half-whispered “Tim,” that may have been the start of some unknown sentence gets lost in the muffled sound of the shower turning on.

For the best, Jon thinks. He doesn’t know what was going to come after that. Didn’t have a plan for the sentence, just  _ Tim-Tim-Tim _ on repeat like a prayer, like he’s begging Tim to be real, to stay real, to stay  _ here _ , and that doesn’t do either of them any good, does it? Jon’s fragile self-assertions that they’ve succeeded and survived could not hold up to scrutiny, not even from himself. Perhaps  _ especially _ not from himself.

It is so easy to convince himself that this isn’t happening.

Because which is more likely: that they’ve all died or failed in the wrecked remains of that wretched wax museum, or that they’re here, that Jon is sitting alone on a bed identical to the one he had hardly slept in the night previous and Tim is in the shower and they are as fine as is possible given their respective circumstances? He’s escaped with hardly a scratch on him. What are the chances of that?

And what happens now? If this is true. If Nikola Orsinov is not laughing at him somewhere in the distance for his foolishness.

Jon has had more moments of near-death in the past year than most people have in a lifetime, and the aftermath has not gotten any easier. Learning how to move on is a skill he has not yet learned; the  _ where do we go from here _ trips him up and sends him into a breathless panic every time.

In the distant part of his mind that is matter-of-fact even as the rest of him dissolves into a panic-haze, he thinks he’s making a marvelous meal for the Stranger right now. What could be more of their ilk than the terror that nothing he is experiencing is real? Or is that more Spiral? Is there a  _ difference _ , is he a fool for trying to categorize in the first place, is all fear the same fear?

Does it matter?  _ He is afraid. _ There is nothing else important.

Until there is: a sound he latches onto, his breaths coming quick but not quick enough to drown out the bathroom lock clicking undone, Tim stepping out with hair dripping wet and pajamas replacing the ashstained clothes he’d gone in with.

The thing is that Jon still cares about Tim. All of the avoidance and shouting in the world could not make Jon forget the friendship (the more-than-that, unnamed but  _ there _ , he swears) that they’d once shared. And he cares about the boundaries Tim has placed, the walls so hastily built between them, vulnerability and something that might have been love turning, through so much fear, into bitterness without end.

Tim has his own things to worry about, his own foiled martyrdom to tackle, and does not need to be concerned with Jon’s choking panic, so as Tim emerges, Jon turns away, angles himself towards the far wall as subtly as he can.

There are two single beds in this room, rather than the single queen bed of the previous night. They’d both known, lying down backs turned to one another, that they would wake up curled around each other like that could protect either of them, and they’d both known whoever woke up first wouldn’t say a word about it as they untangled themselves. It’s happened before, in far easier times than this.

(Jon had briefly woken, but hadn’t dared open his eyes. He’d taken in the feeling of Tim’s arms around him. Warm and solid and living. And he had known, deep in his heart, that it would be the last time he felt that, and despite everything, he’d been unwilling to give that up any sooner than he had to.

The next time he’d woken, it had been to a cold bed beside him and a half-snapped “It’s almost time” from the doorway, but the blankets had been tucked around him with care after Tim had gotten up, and that, too, remained unremarked upon.)

Jon sits on the edge of the bed furthest from the door. He resists the urge to look up again. 

He wants so badly to confirm Tim is there, is real, but the  _ cost _ there — violating this unspoken truce by showing any ounce of emotion, by letting Tim see how his brow is furrowed with his panic. The temptation to reach out and make sure Tim isn’t some sort of ghost — god, Jon doesn’t even  _ believe _ in ghosts, much as he’s had to admit so much of his stubborn skepticism was mere defense, but it seems like such a tangible possibility. His hand reaching and going right though Tim.

He looks at his own hands instead. Clutched whiteknuckled together, though it sends dull flickers of pain through the skin on his burnt left hand and he still jolts at the texture as the fingers of his right hand wrap around it. That’s real, that’s something  _ solid _ that he can cling to, though he isn’t sure he’ll ever be used to it.

In the midst of the Unknowing, he’d looked down at his hands and been unable to make sense of them as something attached to him. He wonders if that’s because he hasn’t had time to adapt the scars covering them to his mental image of himself, or if it would have happened regardless. If he knew who he was more firmly, would he still have lost himself so easily?

Nothing had been familiar there. It’s pointless to blame himself for that, but he is very, very skilled at that particular art.

Jon doesn’t have a plan, but he has reasonable assumptions: Tim will settle into his bed and Jon will slink across the room like he’s guilty of an unspoken crime for daring to cross Tim’s line of sight, get his own shower, settle into his own bed. It’ll be quiet and painful and if he weren’t so thoroughly, bone-achingly tired, he would say that he is unlikely to sleep tonight. As it is, he expects nightmares.

He’s lost enough in his own shivering thoughts to take no notice of footsteps moving across the floor. He is not, however, detached enough to miss the creaking dip of the bed beside him. It’s startling enough that he forgets all notion of protecting Tim from the burden of his panic, looks up with deer-in-headlight eyes.

Tim isn’t quite looking at him. His eyes land somewhere on the wall behind Jon, just to the right of Jon’s face. Jon, in contrast, cannot stop himself from levering the full weight of his gaze directly at Tim; it isn’t quite good enough, but the warmth of his body only a dozen centimeters from Jon’s and the sound of his breathing work towards convincing Jon’s wavering back-and-forth conclusions that this is real.

“Tim,” Jon says, and flounders for any words to follow that. An apology given far too late to mean anything at all? A plea: don’t leave, don’t go anywhere, please, please, please? It’s painful somewhere deep in Jon’s chest to be so  _ fragile _ in front of anyone, but he is going to crack open with the pressure of everything they are not saying.

Tim shakes his head. Such a small motion, but it steals the words from Jon’s throat, leaves him struggling for air once again.

Something he has learned from an accumulation of aftermaths: when the horror of nearly dying is gone and the doubt that perhaps he  _ has _ died has dissipated, the terror of moving forward can choke the breath from his lungs just as easily.

He cannot breathe with the weight of all the unknowns the future holds.

It’s not the first time he and Tim have sat side-by-side as one of them worked their way through a panic attack. It  _ is _ the first in recent history, the first since Prentiss and Sasha and everything that the period afterwards had brought. (Saying it that way seems to absolve Jon of some of the guilt in a way he has not earned, so he corrects his thoughts: it’s the first time he’s been so vulnerable around Tim since accusing Tim of murder and the strain that had brought to their relationship.)

Tim says nothing. Tim hasn’t said anything since he’d told Jon that he was not forgiven. Even as Basira had laid out their plans for tomorrow morning, Tim’d done nothing but nod his comprehension.

He stays silent, but he does reach out and pry Jon’s hands apart where they dig into each other on Jon’s lap. Tim’s hands are just as wormscarred as Jon’s. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that that had been something both of them had gone through. That it could have easily gone a different direction, been some fucked-up facsimile of a bonding moment rather than tearing whatever made up  _ Jon-and-Tim _ into shreds.

He holds onto the hand nearest to him, the burnt one.

He is so gentle. Jon aches as he looks down at their entwined fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Jon whispers into the air. It’s not quiet enough to not shatter whatever peace they’ve crafted in such a tender moment, but Tim doesn’t pull away. That feels like more of a success than surviving had.

Tim is quiet for a long while, the only movement in the deathly-still room the barely-there circling of Tim’s thumb on Jon’s knuckles. Jon’s breathing evens slowly. He doesn’t let go, even when Tim’s hand no longer feels like his only lifeline.

Once Jon has calmed enough to think about breaking the silence with another apology, Tim speaks first, cuts him off before he even has a chance to open his mouth. 

“I wasn’t planning on making it out of there, you know.” Tim says it like it’s a casual thing, but his voice creaks like floorboards in a haunted house, the hours of silence and the pent-up emotion taking its toll.

“I know.” Jon’s gaze does not leave their hands.

“Had all my affairs in order — not that I’ve got much to  _ leave behind _ or people to say goodbye to, but. Wrote a will. Did everything you’re supposed to do when you’re about to—” He cuts off. They both know what would have come next.

“I know,” Jon says again.

“Oh, you  _ know _ that, do you?” Tim is more tired than taunting. Doesn’t seem to have the energy to fight, but he makes the attempt anyway.

“Not like that,” Jon says, equally exhausted and not willing to let any bitterness swell, not while Tim is still holding his hand and sitting next to him. “I just… noticed. In the normal, human way.”

“Right,” Tim says, something in him deflating. If Jon looks, he could find something close to an apology in Tim’s eyes, but he doesn’t dare.

Their trembling breathing echoes in the small room in rounds rather than unison. Jon breathes in, and a half-second out of time, Tim breathes out. On they go.

It’s a stuttering duet. It feels so loud; Jon knows, logically, that cars are racing down the highway just outside and the air conditioner is humming by the window and there are voices coming from every other room in the building, all of them filled with their own shaky breaths and their own struggles, but it seems that the world narrows down to just Tim and himself. For a moment, the solar system orbits not around the sun but their shared hands.

Tim’s voice seems so much smaller when he speaks again.

“What do we do now?”

And god, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The  _ we _ of it echoes in Jon’s mind above all else, scratched-record looping until it no longer seems like a real word. He drowns in that single syllable for a moment. He  _ shouldn’t _ ; Jon is all too aware that he is reading too much into it, that it means nothing beyond that they are staying in the same room for the night, consigned to the same fate, bound to the same Archives, but…

With his hand in Tim’s, it feels like more. It feels like  _ everything _ , for a moment.

“I don’t know,” Jon says. It’s honest. He wouldn’t lie to Tim, and he looks up to Tim’s face, meets his eyes as if that’s proof of his candor. There’s a hopeless aimlessness in Tim’s expression that makes Jon wonder: is this all their lives are now? Shuffling from disaster to disaster, distant from everyone around them, but for small moments like these, small moments Jon would like to live inside, with their hands joined and something in his heart  _ reaching _ towards Tim? He has some flickering hope that the calamity of their lives will calm now that this apocalypse has been averted, but it is nearly extinguished.

(Gertrude had spent her whole life chasing down rituals and blowing them up. Sixty-something years. Jon is only twenty-nine, and he thinks if he has to do any more of this, the house of him will surely collapse. He’ll be nothing but rubble by the time he’s thirty.)

“That isn’t good enough,” Tim says. There’s no bite to it, not really. “You dragged me out of there.”

“If you expect me to apologize for  _ that _ , you’re wrong.” Jon doesn’t have any bravery left in him, his scant stores used up for the next  _ month _ at minimum, but his stubbornness carries him just as well.

He doesn’t regret saving Tim. He thinks it may be the one good thing he’s done in a very long time. Not enough to redeem his mistakes, but… something decent, at least. Proof of humanity.

No, that makes it seem like he had ulterior motives in taking Tim’s arm and not letting go until they were back in the rental van. He hadn’t done it to prove himself or to beg Tim’s forgiveness.

He’d done it because, once, not so long ago, he had loved Tim. He’d done it because he does still.

“I don’t know  _ what _ I’m expecting.” Whatever has been fueling Tim, this sensation just to the left of anger, leaves him all at once; he slumps down, free arm resting on his lap and cradling his head, eyes clenched shut. “I don’t know what to do with any of this.  _ Fuck _ , Jon. I don’t  _ know _ .”

“Can I —” and Jon isn’t even sure what he’s asking, but Tim nods, pulls himself upright just enough that Jon can pry his hand loose from Tim’s and wrap his arms around Tim’s back. As a pair, they tremble like tree leaves in a hurricane; disaster imminent, or disaster past but the memory remaining, or the eye of the storm, more horrors waiting just around the bend.

“I… I won’t apologize for — for pulling you out of there,” Jon says. His head resting in the corner of Tim’s neck and shoulder feels like coming home. It always has been easier to say things like this, without having to look anyone in the eyes. “I’m glad you’re alive. That — that doesn’t encompass it, the feeling, but I — you know I’ve never been spectacular at putting words to something as clumsy as emotion, but — I need you to know that. That I still care. That I still—”

Jon’s cut off by Tim moving backwards, and a jolt of fear goes through him. He’s said too much. Tim is going to retreat to his own bed, an uncrossable distance from Jon, and turn his back and go to sleep and never talk to Jon again, and it will be as if Tim had died, after all.

He holds tight to Tim’s shirt, but Tim only moves far enough back to bring a hand up to Jon’s cheek and pull him closer, closer, closer, and —

It’s been a long time since Tim has kissed him.

The last time was angry and wanting, somewhere in Jon’s paranoia-haze, as if the scrape of teeth against lips could have proven Jon’s humanity and Tim’s innocence both. It had failed to accomplish either goal and left both parties with a stinging dissatisfaction.

When Tim presses his lips to Jon’s, it’s gentle. His hand just barely ghosts over the skin of Jon’s face, the matching wormscars there; Jon has spent far too much time looking out of the corner of his eye and seeing where their scars mirror each other, where their traumas align.

It’s hardly a good kiss by any ordinary metric, but so little about their lives is ordinary, Jon would take this clumsy show of care over anything else. Tim’s lips hardly move against his own, as if this moment would disappear if disturbed even the slightest bit; they’re chapped and imperfect and tears well in Jon’s eyes against all attempts to dispel them. Their breaths stutter unevenly against each other’s mouths and isn’t that just proof that they are  _ alive _ , against all odds?

Jon’s eyes flit open as Tim’s thumb swipes across his cheekbone, smears a tear there. Jon mirrors, wipes away some of the emotion collecting at the corners of Tim’s eyes.

“I think,” Jon says, impossibly softly — no one, not even the Eye, could overhear him; only Tim. “I think all we can do now is… go forward.”

Tim’s forehead rests against Jon’s. They’re so close that Jon goes a little cross-eyed trying to look at Tim, but he can’t bring himself to mind; this moment is more than enough to make up for any inconvenience. “Don’t think I know how to do that,” Tim says with a joyless almost-laugh.

“I’m hardly an expert, myself,” Jon says. Gently, he pulls Tim’s hand away from his own face, tangles their fingers together once more. His panic at the unreality of their situation seems so far away now; there is no universe in which this, the feeling of Tim’s hand in his, could be simulated so perfectly in all of its imperfections. There’s no world in which he could imagine it in such aching detail.

“This doesn’t mean that everything is suddenly fine and dandy between us.” Jon can’t quite read Tim’s expression, but he says it like it’s something between a warning and a secret fear — like if Jon dared to misinterpret this for anything but the first step to rebuilding it is, the option would be closed off to both of them forever.

“I didn’t think it did,” Jon says. A long-dead hope sparks back to life in the dark of his ribcage, against all wisdom, and he continues, quieter: “A start, though, maybe?”

Tim closes his eyes, breathes deeply for an endless minute. 

“Ask me again in the morning.”

It’s as close to a yes as he’s going to get and more than he’d dared to think was possible. It sends such a shuddering warmth through Jon that he almost doesn’t mind Tim pulling back from him, Tim shifting wearily to lie down on the bed Jon had claimed as his own.

“Ah. Okay.” Jon stands, legs shaking with pent-up energy from that bottomless well of panic. “I’ll just —” and he walks over to the other bed, pulls the blankets back.

“Jon.” It’s the closest to amused Tim has sounded in months, generally, and the most while  _ saying Jon’s name _ in… longer than that, surely. Jon freezes and looks back at Tim.

Tim’s hand is outstretched towards him. An invitation.

“Oh,” Jon says, extraordinarily eloquently.

The beds are small enough to lack even the slightest denial that they will wind up all tangled-limbs by morning; the suspension of disbelief they had been granted the night before has dissolved entirely, but Tim is asking, much as he  _ will _ ask, for Jon to lie down beside him, and… Jon thinks about Tim’s lips against his own, and Jon nods.

He flees to the silence of the bathroom to change into sweatpants and an old t-shirt, splashes some water on his face, too exhaustion-heavy for a full shower, and flips off the lights. He isn’t sure when it became so easy for him to navigate in the dark, but he refuses to question it now; it is a small miracle, much as anything the Eye has granted him can count as such, and it is helping him make his way to the bed Tim still lies on, curl up beside him and pull the blankets over them both.

Tim’s arms curl around Jon and Jon’s head rests on Tim’s chest, heartbeat loud and clear under Jon’s ear, and it feels perfect, and it feels  _ right _ , and Jon cannot keep himself from whispering “I love you” into the darkness.

Tim doesn’t respond. Jon thinks for a moment he must already be asleep. He can’t quite tell if that’s a relief or a disappointment, and he is still tallying up marks in each column when Tim shifts, presses the softest of kisses to the top of Jon’s head.

It isn’t the magical sort of kiss that dissolves every wrong they have ever done; nothing could be so powerful, not even death. But it is a start.

**Author's Note:**

> [has a bad day] [projects that bad day onto characters who also have quite a lot of bad days]
> 
> thanks for reading, comments are very good, hmu on tumblr @ dykivist!


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